The Overlook with Matt Peiken

Just as Asheville’s arts community has evolved, so too has ArtsAVL. It changed its name just a year and a half ago from the Asheville Area Arts Council and, even before the pandemic, refocused its mission from service to advocacy.

My guest today is Katie Cornell, executive director now in her fifth year with ArtsAVL. We talk about that mission shift and the work that goes into gathering the data to inform her advocacy wit...

Want to know what’s happening with McCormick Field, Thomas Wolfe Auditorium and the Western North Carolina Nature Center? My guest has the answers.

Chris Corl is General Manager and Director of Community & Regional Entertainment Facilities for the City of Asheville. We go into detail about the upcoming trip around the bases for McCormick Field’s renovation, including what’s being done to turn the stadium into a year-round facili...

Asheville is very much a music town—not just for musicians, but also for fans, as evidenced by the six record stores dotting the city. As we approach the annual Record Store Day, April 20, we talk with Mark Capon of Harvest Records, Jesse McSwain of Static-Age Records and Morgan Markowitz of Earth River Records. 

We talk about the evolution of their shops—for instance, Static-Age is now also a bar/restaurant and live music...

Downtown business owners, workers and residents spent a lot of 2023 imploring Asheville officials to get a handle on crime, trash and vagrancy. All along, many were pressing to take matters into their own hands by working with city leaders to form what’s called a business improvement district.

A business improvement district—or BID—is a tax assessment that pays for services on top of what cities and counties already provid...

D. Tyrell McGirt says his career path was blazed as a 10-year-old in Greensboro, when his mother signed him up for a lifeguarding class. He ran parks and recreation departments in Alabama, Arizona and Alaska before moving two years ago to lead the department in Asheville.

In this conversation, McGirt talks through his department's recent decision to keep Malvern Hills Park Pool closed this year and balancing the needs of pickle...

Seventy years ago, Black Mountain College was a petri dish for experimental art, sound and performance. It was also the birthplace of so-called “happenings”—events where practitioners strived to transcend the bounds of existence and expression.

Today, the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center throws an annual “(Re)Happening.” The 12th (Re)Happening is April 20. Artists who embody the ethos of old are descending on ...

Middle housing is all the rage in planning and urban development circles—that is, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, clusters of homes with no garages but maybe a shared park, in walkable neighborhoods close to transit. Basically, it's housing with many of the functions of traditional single-family homes but developed with equity, the environment and affordability in mind.

This past week, the Asheville nonprofit Mountai...

The Buncombe County District Attorney’s office prosecutes dozens of cases every week, from capital murder to trivial infractions. But DA Todd Williams seems at least a bit frustrated by the public’s lingering interest in what, on paper, resulted in guilty verdicts for misdemeanor trespassing. Some are holding up the charges as veiled attacks on freedom of the press.

Williams, in his 10th year helming the office, talks in depth with ...

Barbie Angell is a poet and storyteller, children’s book author and emcee. Threading all of it, she’s a survivor. She’s candid about the range of abuse she experienced throughout her youth, and a quarter-century of ongoing psychological abuse she alleges from a domestic partner.

The last few years have been particularly difficult for my guest today. While the pandemic brought its own fears and isolation for  Angell, recent...

If the nonprofit world awarded medals for bravery on the battlefront, the counselors and volunteers for the SPARC Foundation could be the most decorated in Asheville. SPARC works with people who’ve committed child abuse, domestic abuse and street violence to find other paths of behavior.

My guest today is Jackie Latek, the founding executive director of the SPARC Foundation. We get granular about how she and her team work to change ...

Just last week, Asheville City Schools voted to merge Montford North Star Academy into Asheville Middle School. The move will reduce the district’s $4.5 million budget shortfall by as much as half, but it also raised a lot of anger, sadness and questions from affected parents. 

My guest today is Greg Parlier, a reporter who covers education for the Mountain Xpress. We look backward and forward at this decision, along with underlying...

Chris Jehly says he used to mock artists who painted the natural landscape. At the time, he was a graffiti artist inspired by BMX and metal music. Since his move to Asheville, he’s become one of the artists he used to dismiss.

The plein-air paintings documenting his local hikes and other sojourns into the woods are on through the end of March at Tyger Tyger Gallery, in the River Arts District. We talk about his path from g...

Watch any of his performances or study his visual art, the easy takeaway on Edwin Salas is he's one disturbed artist. And how could he not be?

When I profiled him in 2019 for Asheville's public radio station, he told me about the rape he suffered 30 years earlier and about the murder of his mother when he was just 5 years old. Indeed, much of his creativity blooms from what he labels his “dark happy place” and is...

Last year, the North Carolina Department of Transportation began the process of claiming properties through eminent domain for the widening of Interstate 240 and construction of the I-26 Connector. Rob and Sarah Shearan noticed the NCDOT offering their neighbors full replacement value on their properties. Not so for them.

While the project maps show construction and expansion happening within mere yards of their property,...

Noah Bendix-Balgley is a revered violinist—concertmaster with the Berlin Philharmonic and a soloist who performs with orchestras internationally. He’s also a native of Asheville.

I talk with him about the details on his ambitious, weeklong residency with the Asheville Symphony, beginning March 11. We  talk about his training and career path and how his Jewish roots play into his music-making. We also talk about his long connection t...

This is the second of two episodes recorded from the Feb. 20 Asheville City Council candidates mixer at Citizen Vinyl, thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. You'll hear my short conversations with candidates Iindia Pearson, CJ Domingo and Kim Roney.

The previous episode, posted Monday, features my conversations with candidates Bo Hess, Kevan Frazier and Sage Turner.

Three seats on the council will be ...

Three seats on Asheville’s City Council will be filled in November’s general election, but to get there, we need to first get through a small-stakes primary. I say small stakes because of the seven candidates on the ballot, only one will drop off after the March 5 primary.

Still, that didn’t keep locals from packing Citizen Vinyl last Tuesday for a casual mixer thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. Six of the seven...

Andrew Jones of the Asheville Watchdog is so busy covering Mission’s past, present and future, he has nine bylined stories about the hospital so far in February alone. I talked with him just yesterday to get the latest, including details of alarming findings from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the so-called Immediate Jeopardy Mission faces in potentially losing its ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid pay...

The North Carolina primary election is March 5 and early voting is already underway. But the Republican supermajority in the stage legislature has passed laws making voting more difficult.

My guests today are Robin Lively Summers of Indivisible Asheville and Leslie Boyd of the Poor People’s Campaign. They’re part of a coalition of nonprofits working to educate and engage prospective voters in Western North Carolina. Others...